BTX on USB pen drive

[Miroslav Lachman]

Daniel O'Connor wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Vincent Mialon wrote:
> 
>>I tested various options in boot0cfg with no sucess. I also tested
>>the howto from
>>http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-u
>>sb-stick-episode-2 with a 6.3 FreeBSD release which boots on my pc but
>>doesn't boot on my supermicro server.
>>
>>Do you have any idea or pointer that may help me find the way to boot
>>this usb drive ? I may file a bug report if you want.
> 
> 
> I wanted to make a USB flash drive based installer for FreeBSD but 
> unfortunately BTX seems to have issues that make it difficult to do 
> reliably :(

I did it in the past. I have 512MB USB flashdisk with 30MB bootable 
partition from miniboot.iso (FreeBSD 6.2) with GRUB. I used it to 
install system on Sun Fire X2100 servers without CD-ROM.

> Here are 2 patches I tried..
> http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx
> http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_crx.patch
> 
> They improved things but I still found a number of systems where BTX 
> would spin dumping register info so fast I couldn't read it (or take a 
> photo..).
> 
> Unfortunately I have no idea how you'd debug this sort of thing, it's 
> too much like DOS programming for me :)
> 
> FWIW when it did work it was great :) I used FreeSBIE as my base - it 
> has stuff to build USB images in CVS (v2). http://www.freesbie.org/
> 
> I don't know if it's possible to use GRUB or something like that instead 
> of BTX.. I have no experience with it, but I would be very interested 
> if it did work (although since GRUB is i386 only and I use amd64 
> systems that's another hurdle..)

I think you can use GRUB, because it is used in stage where all systems 
works the same way and amd64 kernel will be booted in later stage.

Miroslav Lachman